Ray Kurzweil Brings Poetry to Google

Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a panel presentation on the future of SEO, in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event was the first Digital Marketing for Business Conference (and it was filled with some great sessions). The presentation wasn’t a PowerPoint and pitter-patter type talk.

Instead, I was joined by Russ Jones (The Google Cache) and Jenny Halasz (Archology) in somewhat of a free-for-all where we each exhibited our (biased) thoughts about where SEO would take us tomorrow. Conference Host and Q&A Moderator for the session, Phil Buckley had purposefully constructed a presentation where he asked questions and had each of us take turns answering, and responding to the other panelist responses as well. There were disagreements on some simple topics, and disagreement on some more complex topics, and oddly a lot of agreement as well.

Advice on the Future of SEO

In our final take-aways, as Phil asked for them, we had the chance to impart advice on one thing that people should pay careful attention to, and one thing that our audience members should absolutely do. I had the chance to start, and recommended that when people create content for their pages and research keywords that they carefully pay attention to the audience for their sites and the objectives of the sites themselves.

As for the absolute “to do,” I insisted that any pages being created don’t just include some text on them and strings of keywords inserted into them, but that the pages be about that. Rather than just placing keyword terms and maybe some related terms in prominent places on a page, go through other pages that are returned for a search.

Look at the attributes and aspects related to the query terms that show up in titles and snippets and documents that are returned for the query.

Consider what query sessions might say about those queries and what other related questions other searchers might be inputting when including a specific query for a search.

Google’s knowledge base is part of the future of SEO, so understand why the entities that might show up in a search actually do appear (not just brands, but specific people, places and ideas).

See what the audience for a site writes about the topic it covers, and how they write it and the words they use. Find what future audience members might think and wonder and answer their questions, address their informational needs, make them happy and satisfied that they found the page that you created.

Russ and Jenny had their chance to respond as well, and since they both have their own digital publishing platform, I’m going to leave it to them to share their words with you if they want. As we wrapped up, I was really happy with our presentation and its friction and its points of agreement.

The audience strikes back

And then our audience had their chance to have their say, and the questions continued.

A presentation like this can be like performing on a trapeze without a net – we had no idea what Questions Phil was going to ask, and no idea how the other panelists were going to respond, and were a little too busy to take notes on what the others were saying.

And the audience questions showed that they were taking some notes – with some really great questions.

The Wrong Transhumanist

The last question though was a complete curveball. Search Engine Academy trainer, SEO consultant, and software developer Mike Marshall addressed the question to me, and if I remember correctly, it was something about the influence of Transhumanism on SEO.

My first impulse was to respond with some mentions and discussion about Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, who has written one of the most influential textbooks on Artificial Intelligence (AI) ever, and has discussed Google’s movement towards AI and how long a road it has to get there.

Mike stopped me before I got more than a couple of words out, and I knew then that he was talking about an even more well known Transhumanist who joined Google not too long ago, and is working on building a mind while at Google.

When will we see AI at Google?

Just how might the influence of Ray Kurzweil impact the future of SEO and Search?

I was tempted to mention Google’s Acquisition of Behav.io (this link will be dead probably within a few weeks or so, read it now!) last week. The predictive algorithmic capabilities they’ve been developing around sensor data in mobile devices has the power to boost Google Now from Pre-School to possibly useful.

If you haven’t researched them yet, you’re missing out. CEO and Co-Founder at Behavio, Nadav Aharony’s presentation at SXSW in 2012, Investigating Social Mechanisms with Mobile Phones, provides a hint at what smart phones can do when used really smartly.

But I pulled the patent card.

Probably not a surprise.

But what was probably a surprise to most of the audience of marketers and search enthusiast was that one of Google’s most publicized hires ever, not only published patents on artificial intelligence and medical devices, and reading machines, but also on poetry.

It’s not something that most people talk about, and I had never seen the poetry patents referred to before I dug through them at the USPTO. No mentions on Techcrunch or Mashable or Engadget that I noticed of Kurweil’s patents on Poetry Personalities.

Unlike IBM’s Watson slugging it out with Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, if Ray Kurzweil builds an AI mind at Google, it might just give a poetry recital instead. As Kurzweil noted in a recent interview, part of what he is working on is to get computers to talk like humans. If a computer can create poetry, it can tell what a page is “about.”

I’ve listed the pending and granted poetry patents, and links to them, and then the remainder of granted and pending patents that Ray Kurzweil is a co-inventor on. While I don’t link directly to those, you can go to the USPTO search page and look them up if you want to find out more. A number of these patent filings have identical names, and are continuation patents – if you want to see where they differ, it’s going to be in the claims sections where claims have been updated, narrowed, and focused.

A computer poetry screen saver including loading an author analysis model, randomly selecting a seed word from the author analysis model, completing a poem following the seed word and displaying the poem on an output device.

A method of generating a poet personality including reading poems, each of the poems containing text, generating analysis models, each of the analysis models representing one of poems and storing the analysis models in a personality data structure.

The personality data structure further includes weights, each of the weights associated with each of the analysis models. The weights include integer values.

A method of analyzing an author’s work, including reading a text file, generating an analysis model from the text file and storing the analysis model. The text file may be a poem, the poem containing ASCII text. The analysis model is a linked data structure. The linked data structure includes n-gram data structures, the n-gram structures including combinations of 1-gram data structures, bigram data structures, trigram data structures and quadrigram data structures.

A method of providing a graphical user interface (GUI) in a poetry generation system including displaying a work space, receiving a user input to the word space and linking the user input to a plurality of poet assistant windows. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 wherein The work space may be derived from executing a word processing program.

The user input may be a word.

The poet assistant’s windows may include a combination of a next word window, a finish line window, a finish poem window, a rhyme word window and an alliterative window. Each of the poet’s assistant windows may include a poet personality.

Other Patent Filings co-invented by Raymond Kurzweil:

There are a lot of other patent filings from Ray Kurzweil, and even a glance at the titles for these documents shows the wide range of interests and topics that he’s been involved in. The granted patents are listed first, and then the pending patent applications.

US Patent Number 8321371 – Enhanced artificial intelligence language

US Patent Number 8320708 – Tilt adjustment for optical character recognition in portable reading machine

US Patent Number 8284999 – Text stitching from multiple images

US Patent Number 8249309 – Image evaluation for reading mode in a reading machine

US Patent Number 8204580 – Use of patterns in processing on mobile monitoring device and computer system

US Patent Number 8186581 – Device and method to assist user in conducting a transaction with a machine

Related

Reader Interactions

Comments

Great Post Bill and great references too! Thanks for this very thorough answer to my question. As always, it was great hanging out with you in Raleigh.

Poetry is a pretty important area of study for AI. It deals with aspects of creativity which, in the view of proponents of Lady Lovelace’s objection that computers can do nothing original, highlights the differences between machines and humans. Poetry also showcases hard problems of practical AI, in natural language generation, expressive speech and non-verbal behaviour. This area of research has potentially strong opportunities for synergies amongst both researchers and practitioners in AI, Literature, Performance Arts, Philosophy and Psychology. If they can crack this, they may be able to get machine algorithms (think search engine bots and crawlers) better able to judge sentiment and anticipate personalized responses to content and even the persuasiveness of marketing copy. That’s the tip of the iceberg. I could also envision how emotions, gestures, facial expressions and the like could be used to trigger searches via biotech devices which I talk about in an upcoming article in Website Magazine.

I’ll enjoy going through the references you listed Bill, thanks for pulling that all together.

Wow, this Adov Naharony lecture is great, not to mention, this whole article is great! Thank you for the information. I noticed some image patents in here, did they say anything about artificial intelligence working with images as well?

I have a new partner that has spent a great deal of time over the last 15 years studying neural science as it relates to consumer behavior / buying habits. Additionally, he has taken this information and combined it with content development strategies and will soon be launching what we will believe will be a new paradigm in branding and brand marketing.

I mention this simply to say that it is all quite fascinating and the future surely will be interesting for those of us that are charged with the responsibility of helping businesses compete and get their messages to their communities / target audiences.

I hope you don’t mind and if you do please let me know but I linked SEO By The Sea in an article I just put up on our site. It’s called SEO-SEM – Learn Your ABC’s!

Considering the wealth of knowledge you have on the subject matter I thought this would be a great place for those that are trying to get caught up on this whole paradigm shift to do so.